From Disclaimer to Critique: Race and the Digital Image
ArchivistKate HolterhoffGeorgia Institute of Technologykate.holterhoff@gmail.com

Kate Holterhoff is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research areas include
nineteenth-century British literature, visual culture, digital
humanities, and the history of science. She has published articles in

English Literature in Transition,
1880-1920 (forthcoming), The Journal of
Victorian Culture, The Journal of the
History of Biology, and Victorian
Network.
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations000324011328 August 2017article

While the massive and difficult task of finding, documenting, and centralizing
collections is certainly of great concern to image archivists, and has been the
motivating factor for beginning numerous digital humanities projects, strategies
and best practices for archiving challenging or offensive visual objects (images
that are non-canonical, violent, and ambiguous) remains under-theorized. Using
the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia,

Harpweek, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, and Visual Haggard: The Illustration
Archive as case studies, I address the question of how digital image
archivists ought to approach the task of curating objects with the potential to
cause trauma. I bring together several critical strands–most importantly visual
culture, race theory, and archival science–to question how the structure of a
digital archive database might best achieve the goals of educating the public,
supporting social justice, and enabling the researches of humanities
scholars.

Kate Holterhoff, through a variety of case studies, address the question of how
digital image archivists ought to approach the task of curating objects with the
potential to cause trauma.

What is the duty of a digital image archivist to her objects, community, and the
historical record? As digitization increasingly mediates the stories we tell
ourselves about the past, humanists must reevaluate this constellation of concerns.
Visual objects housed in archives, libraries, and museums and previously accessible
to only a select few are now digitally available through image scans, video essays,
and 3D virtual tours, to name just a few formats. While the massive and difficult
task of finding, documenting, and centralizing collections is certainly of great
concern to image archivists, and has been the motivating factor for beginning
numerous digital humanities projects, strategies and best practices for archiving
challenging or offensive visual objects (images that are non-canonical, violent, and
ambiguous) remain under-theorized. Using as case studies the Pitt Rivers Museum, the
Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia,

Harpweek, the
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and an archive that I direct and edit
titled Visual Haggard, I address the question of how
digital image archivists ought to approach the task of curating objects with the
potential to cause trauma. I bring together several critical strands–most
importantly visual culture, race theory, and archival science–to question how the
structure of a digital archive database might best achieve the goals of educating
the public, supporting social justice, and enabling the researches of humanities
scholars. Inspired by the museums of conscience idea , which argues that museums offer a space for
education and justice, I contend that improving database search functionality
through heavy editing–metadata that is voluminous, polyvocal, and critical–is at
present the best means for facilitating digital image archives to contribute to this
increasingly significant socio-political project.

Prominent digital humanists like Lev Manovich have long argued that objects remain
effectively invisible without adequate database search functionality , and nowhere is this so evident as in the case of
images. Michael Whitelaw claims that in order to interrogate the 7,000 images
archived by the Manly Public Library in Sydney, Australia, scholars require more
generous interfaces that permit browsing . Allan Sekula troubles the illusion of
truthfulness fostered by the paradigm of photographic archives, which he argues by their very structure maintain a hidden connection
between knowledge and power. Searchability is essential to all web applications that provide an interface
to databases of predominantly visual archival material (

Rossetti Archive, Visual Haggard, William Blake Archive), but the
question of what types of searching these interfaces should stimulate remains
unresolved. Online databases typically contain the resources, metadata, and
references to all media for a hypertext website. It is the role of the database to
structure data, but with current technology it cannot imbue that data with meaning.
In Manovich’s words: As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list
of items, and it refuses to order this list. In the case of images, problems regarding descriptive and searchable
metadata tags become particularly important, as these must be individually
identified, articulated, and encoded by archivists. While this task is often
restricted to the straightforward identification of artist, medium, dimensions,
provenance, and subject matter, a more detailed metadata description might also
include interpretive information about style, referents, content, and art movements.
Of course, even experts contest how to interpret these latter features, which makes
historical images of violence and hate notoriously challenging to not only digitize
and preserve, but also categorize. Image metadata, which must always be in some
degree subjective and interpretative, has become a logical site for inserting
analysis and critique.

As art historian James Elkins notes, pictures are… stubbornly illegible, weirdly silent,
meaningless artifacts where all our best attempts
at understanding fall apart. Digital image archivists must create narratives and keywords to guide
visitors into and around the database, essentially bestowing voice and meaning onto
objects that are otherwise mute. For this reason the searchability of digital
archives devoted to images is almost entirely dependent on human invention. It is no
great wonder that editor for the

Blake Archive Morris
Eaves laments that the day-to-day editorial reality on the picture front remains
rocky and polluted, while digital rhetoric scholars Douglas Eyman and Cheryl Ball have
complained about the absence of a coherent body of scholarship that offers a sustained
analysis of scholarly multimedia and its growing impact on digital
scholarship in the humanities. Eyman and Ball are overwhelmingly concerned with textual design, but
their argument extends to all digital projects that rely on visual objects. See
also, . I will respond to this difficulty
by considering what problems arise for the digital archivist tasked with composing
descriptive metadata for offensive images. My study examines variously sized museums
and archives that provide online access to images because all institutions deal
closely with digitized images of historical objects, and therefore grapple with
overlapping concerns. In fact, every digital archive is visual because archives must
include scans and photographs of primary documents and objects in addition to
transcriptions and descriptions .
However, I focus my project on graphic pictures, and not scanned images of written
texts, in order to better assess not only how much formal information the archivist
should provide about the object, but specifically how the archivist should approach
ethically abhorrent visual content.

Theorizing potentially traumatic texts, objects, and images is important to the
digital archive’s continued evolution. As suggested by recent discussions about the
role of feminism for archives by Tarez Samra Graban and Jacqueline Wernimont , as well as Kimberly Christen’s
development of the Mukurtu content management system, or digital safe
keeping place, which emerged in response to the unique needs of
tribal archives, libraries, and museums (TALMs), the stakes of thinking through best
practices for ally archivism is a timely and necessary project. Allies must
recognize the cause of justice as a process rather than an endpoint, and must
actively seek out the marginalized voices they purpose to represent. In the West,
and especially the United States, few issues have been as polemic as the discourse
surrounding social justice. My essay both responds to this expedience, and comes out
of recent calls to make the humanities, and especially the digital humanities, more
accountable. Consider Jessica Marie Johnson’s statement in an interview with the

Los Angeles Review of Books: I think there are questions that the humanities has struggled
with and for me those questions relate to issues of accountability: Are we
accountable to students? Are we accountable to the communities our
universities are in? Are we accountable to all of our students? Are we
accountable to transgender students who want to use different bathrooms? On
the surface those seem like things that are aside from humanities work and
scholarship. But I think that what the humanities is grappling with is how
to be relevant to a changing demographic and changing communities, both at
the university level and within the communities in which universities are
situated.The important and complex
question of accountability in the humanities is one with which researchers and
educators alike must grapple, but it is particularly significant for creators and
maintainers of public facing online archives.

This article assesses some examples of digital image archives to consider what a
socially responsible archival practice might look like. I argue that a more
inclusive, flexible, and plural means of archive metadata construction can be
preferable for cataloging traumatic materials than holding too rigidly or singularly
to top-down, institutionally developed nomenclature precedents, database structures,
and labeling standards (e.g. the Library of Congress subject headings,
the Visual Resources Association, and the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Categories for the
Description of Works of Art). I will suggest that rich or heavy editing offers ally
archivists the best means for promoting accountability because it permits a greater
number of voices to be heard than that which is afforded by more conventional
labeling and keyword attribution techniques. Several digital archivists have already
called for this expansive type of metadata creation. When Mukurtu researchers
found that traditional library catalogs often lacked essential details beyond a
short quote or internal tracking number, providing little information to
users they pushed back against these incomplete and unrepresentative Westernized standards of content management. Thanks to its collaborative and inclusive development process, Mukurtu now
permits users to implement their own cultural practices for sharing
materials, and to richly narrate those materials. Similarly, Amanda Gailey, co-editor of the unpublished

Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age project, which is
intended to allow researchers to examine how this body of literature
and illustrations helped construct notions of race and childhood during a
pivotal period in U.S. history, has been a vocal proponent of heavy editing to make
this digital archive’s metadata useful for students and researchers alike . I extend these existing calls for
richly narrate[d] and heavy editing to
all image archives containing objects that might cause distress because this
strategy provides the best means for holding digital projects accountable to the
groups and individuals they continue to traumatize. By including a plurality of
voices within a database’s metadata, archives may become more diverse, critical, and
inclusive.

The Museum Database

When museums and archives moved online their roles shifted, and nowhere is this
so apparent as with visual objects. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of digital
archivists, primary texts–written, aural, and visual–are no longer cordoned off
behind marble walls that admit only willing patrons. Once made available online
and in open access form, encoded tags, keywords, and annotations exist as part
of the entire Internet, and not merely within the context of one single
database. Typing a database’s metadata keywords or phrases into a search engine
like Google draws-in individuals previously unaware of an archive and its
subject matter. Search engine results create continuity between various
websites; they are dependent on algorithms, and for that reason the most useful
and discoverable metadata must be that which most fully accords with the logic
of the search engine. Yet facilitating discovery poses numerous challenges.
While the judicious implementation of tags is necessary to the work of the
digital archivist, achieving a complete, universal, or unbiased set of metadata
tags is obviously impossible. No object can ever be completely searchable.
Relatedly, some searches return false connections (through synonyms or trending
searches). However, using descriptive metadata that serves the same purpose as
annotations might illuminate basic content such as the intent of the original
creator and information about the reading experience of historical audiences.
Annotations should anticipate the likely needs of scholarly and lay readers
while forecasting the possible interests of audiences in the future. Today it is
rare for object tags to achieve even a portion of these worthwhile qualities,
and possibly for good reason.

Descriptive metadata makes primary materials available immediately, unexpectedly,
and intimately. This accessibility affects more than just scholars. Discovering
historical documents and artifacts can lead to creative interpretations and
remixes in popular culture. In fact, cyberpunk novelist William Gibson states: Our culture no longer bothers to use words like
appropriation or borrowing… The record,
not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the
digital.Gibson's statement does not address questions of appropriation
expressed by postcolonial and race theorists. Placing digitized
archival materials online expands and re-contextualizes their significance, and
visual texts are particularly liable to remixing. Consider the Internet meme
created using the 1793 self-portrait of French painter Joseph Ducreaux (

Portrait de l'artiste sous les traits
d'un moqueur, Louvre Museum). These witty,
entertaining, and topical remixed memes represent the best of online culture.
Joseph Ducreaux’s impish expression and pointing fingers have inspired meme
creators to make comics combining contemporary sentiments with archaic phrasing.
One anonymous author, for example, attached the phrase Gentlemen, I inquire
who hath released the hounds?, which a little thinking reveals to be an
overwrought parody of the Baha Men song Who Let the Dogs
Out? (2000). More and more educators hold up the meme form, and this
subset specifically, as exemplary for expanding vocabulary, encouraging critical
thinking, and introducing the public to art history. Unfortunately, facilitating
access to primary materials also has the potential to perpetuate, and even
proliferate, stereotypes about historically oppressed groups. As the numerous
Black Sambo caricatures of Barack Obama available online suggests, racist
primary materials also have the ability to resurface as inspiration for
contemporary hate speech. Access to historical images is a reality, and in many
respects a positive one, but how these texts are discovered and contextualized
by way of metadata tags and database structure remains unsettled.

The object collection database for the Pitt Rivers Museum, an institution housing
over half a million anthropological and ethnological artifacts, provides a
useful example of metadata’s role in archival practice. In addition to more
concrete information about each artifact’s dimensions and material, this archive
sorts entries using Keywords (amulet, hook, quiver) and Classifications
(agriculture, clothing, writing). Generally absent though is interpretative
information such as, say, an amulet’s possible significance or the likely
ceremonial function of a piece of clothing. This is no great surprise
considering that, as Jeremy Coote, a curator and joint head of collections at
the Pitt Rivers Museum explains, the databases were initially constructed for internal
use. It was then decided to make them available online for the benefit
of researchers and the wider public. The repercussions of openly releasing museum records online are
numerous. Scholars may now conduct research in the Pitt Rivers Museum object
collections virtually at anytime and from any place in the world. While access
democratizes the collection, it has also divorced these artifacts from
curatorial supervision. Experts may not require guidance by way of heavy
editorializing to glean needed information from the archive, but the absence of
historical and cultural context may be disadvantageous to non-academics tasked
with interpreting these objects from metadata created to assist scholars. The
Pitt Rivers Museum object collections interface provides the public with access
to identifiers like the accession number, geographical region, cultural group,
and field collector, but without interpretive and contextual information it
remains most appropriate for academics, archivists, and anthropologists.
Although the site offers curated blog posts and education guides, a lack of
editorial commentary within the structure of the database itself can make
visiting the Pitt Rivers object collections database rather disconcerting for
non-specialists, and possibly traumatic to visitors encountering its offensive
content.

What interests me about the Pitt Rivers Museum’s digital archive is its
historicity. This database highlights the museum’s role as not only an active
and growing anthropological collection, but also an institution bounded by
nineteenth-century traditions and ideological assumptions. More so than other
institutions, the Pitt Rivers Museum contains, and was in previous decades
responsible for generating, ideologically contentious and sometimes hateful
content. For this reason, the collection provides access to not only images and
metadata pertaining to the artifacts of ancient and diverse peoples, but also
letters, manuscripts, and photographs documenting the work of Pitt Rivers and
his colleagues in the field. In order to ensure that users are made aware of the
status of these records the database includes the statement: It is important to see how objects were perceived in
the past, therefore we preserve all the information ever recorded. Some
of the historic wording may now appear outdated and even
offensive. Curators at Pitt Rivers consider this statement to be so important that
the popup windows accompanying every object in the database paraphrase this last
sentence. Mr. Coote explains the necessity of repeating this disclaimer for
ensuring that such an explanation was present on any single
record, which might of course be printed out. Both historical integrity and transparency about the information’s
status is laudable but limited. Disclaimers resemble trigger warnings because
they notify visitors of offensive content. Yet disclaimers also serve to
disassociate the mission and ideology of an institution from the content it
hosts and disseminates. In fact, the Pitt Rivers Museum implicitly supports the
notion that publishing information differs from upholding it. While I have no
interest in tackling the philosophical and ethical question of whether some
documents ought to be made public ever, an issue about which Wikileaks continues
to grapple , the disclaimer paradigm is passive and
typically neglects the opportunity to engage with visitors, scaffold user
experience, and critique the past.

I pause to consider a particularly upsetting example taken from the Pitt Rivers
Museum manuscript collection, albeit a transcription rather than an image, and
then consider opportunities to critique this traumatic content. This archive
records several sexist, racist, and xenophobic letters written by Patrick
Michael Byrne (1856-1932) to Anglo-Australian anthropologist Baldwin Spencer
(1860-1929) on the topics of science and the Native
Question. Although Byrne was the officer-in-charge for the
Overland Telegraph Line, and not a scientist, he took a keen interest in
evolutionary biology and ethnography . In
a letter dated 24 May 1895, Byrne mocks Alexander Thomas Magarey (1849-1906) and
Thomas Worsnop (1821-1898), members of the Royal Geographical Society of
Australasia, for what he interprets as their sympathy towards the religion and
art of native Australians. Byrne dismisses the notion that these aboriginals
have a true spiritual life, joking that a religion as profitable as Theosophy
might be invented with the assistance of an aboriginal
conjuror, because if a third rate female trickster can deceive an
Australian Judge, one should be able to educate a nigger to gull the
ordinary Public in a very short space of time. Encountering and contextualizing attitudes like those articulated by
Byrne and his contemporaries is an unfortunate reality for historians. In past
decades, feminists, race theorists, postcolonial critics, cultural studies
scholars, and historians of science have all worked to mediate these threads of
nineteenth-century bigotry, but I wonder about the consequences of making
Byrne’s words publicly available on the Internet. Is it the responsibility of
digital archivists to curate and annotate the hateful objects they release into
the online public sphere, or should these statements be made outside of the
archive in peer-reviewed journals, edited collections, or academic blogs?

Few would argue that Byrne’s letter should be censored or removed entirely,
myself included, but scholars must think carefully about the context,
accessibility, and descriptive tags that accompany hateful digitized artifacts.
Instead of remaining silenced in a box stored physically on site, objects in
digital archives have the potential to speak again through the public’s
often-unpredictable keyword searches. All voices and ideas rendered searchable
online are immortal. Like zombies, search engines ensure that proper keyword
entry revives all lexical metadata. But what information might accompany, if not
every, at least all problematic texts? Perhaps portions of archives containing
obviously offensive content might incorporate specific editorial statements
rather than general disclaimers (although it is worth noting that the manuscript
collections portion of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s website that contains Byrne’s
letters does not include the statement about outdated and
offensive content that accompanies the object
collections database). The Pitt Rivers Museum’s treatment of its collections
suggests that, in a sense, digitizing hate-promoting primary documents revives
these voices, so, in the case of Byrne, archivists might consider including
links to an explanation of the historical relationship between bigotry and the
discipline of anthropology, the British Empire, Social Darwinism, and/or Spencer
and Byrne’s biographies. Archivists might also direct readers to something
written by the community of Australian peoples Byrne disparages. Finally,
metadata labeling this material as racist might be included
as a TEI tag so that researchers looking to study this type of material can more
easily discover and offer scholarly critique of Byrne’s letter. In short, rather
than a static digital record of hate and prejudice, however historically
accurate, the Pitt Rivers archivists might use Spencer’s words as an opportunity
to talk back to the past.

I admit the grounds of my discussion about the Pitt Rivers Museum’s digital
archive are slippery. In the first place, ideas equally if not more offensive to
those expressed in Byrne’s letter can be found in the books digitized and made
searchable through optical character recognition (OCR) rendering in digital
libraries including

Project Gutenberg, Google
Books, HathiTrust, and Internet Archive. Second, it takes an enormous amount of time and
funding to add annotations to a museum or archive’s vast collections–resources
that might be better spent on preservation and maintenance initiatives. To the
first concern I counter that annotation and curation should be what sets digital
archives and museums apart from digital libraries. In the second, it seems to me
that because financial barriers vary on a case-to-case basis, institutions might
prioritize curation for cases of extreme or obviously hateful content.

The Digital Archive as Critique

Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor of Harvard University’s

Image
of the Black in Western Art Archive and a self-described collector
of what he terms racist memorabilia, suggests that there
are compelling reasons for exhibiting racist artifacts, with the most important function of displaying and
collecting this stuff [being] a didactic one: critique. In Gates’s words, we need to study these images in order to deflect the
harm that they continue to inflict upon African Americans, at the
deepest levels of the American unconscious. Because racism persists in contemporary culture, material artifacts of
this hate must be preserved, displayed, and studied. But what does it mean to
use visual artifacts as a means of critique in digital archives? In this section
I survey examples of online collections devoted to racist American artifacts, as
well as strategies for their inclusion in hypertext formats.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University has a
similar mission to that expressed by Gates of using, objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote
social justice. Highlighting racist American ephemera promotes change by underscoring
the trauma these images continue to cause. The legacy of racism in the United
States is far from resolved, so it remains necessary for humanists to highlight
past inequalities in order to promote social justice in the present. Because
this museum’s mission includes advocating the scholarly examination of
historical and contemporary expressions of racism, founder and curator
David Pilgrim has made context and curatorship an extremely important component
of this institution . It is for this reason that,
unlike many other museums, explanatory statements and labels are lengthy and
plentiful. The visibility of offensive images must not be suppressed or
forgotten, but it should not exist without curation. Images of hate speak too
loudly and powerfully to go unmediated by scholars and activists.

Contrasting with the Pitt Rivers Museum’s large database of minimally tagged
objects, the website for the much smaller (9,000 objects) Jim Crow Museum
accompanies its objects and collections related to racial segregation,
anti-black caricatures, civil rights, and African American achievement
with heavy annotations through informational videos, essays, and lesson plans
. In fact, online there is no database record.
Instead, Pilgrim embeds a sampling of objects within categorical hypertext
essays focused on caricature types: Brute, Picaninny, Tom, Nigger, Saphire,
Jezebel, Mammy, Coon, the Tragic Mulatto, Golliwog and Nat. To view images of
these caricatures visitors must first access an essay contextualizing and
historicizing the stereotype. The Mammy essay, for example, includes five images
of individual objects, unaccompanied by title or creation date in addition to a
sixth panoramic photograph of the physical display case devoted to this
caricature type. There is also a link to a slideshow showcasing 75 Mammy
stereotype images. Instead of including objects in a labeled and sorted
database, the website contextualizes a sampling of artifacts in a way that
explains their social, political, and historical significance.

It is important to note that none of the images available on the Jim Crow Museum
website are tagged with metadata enabling visitors to search for them using
criteria other than their stereotype. For instance, if I wanted to see all
examples of ceramics or advertisements, I would have to sort through all the
images discretely. Pilgrim explains that the construction of a public database
containing more complete records for the museum is underway . While this will provide an interface to permit
searching, the records for the entire collection will never be made publicly
available online. In fact, database access may even be restricted to members of
the Ferris State University community. The editorial decision to include
educational context about the legacy of racism first, and access to images and
examples as a means of supporting this message second, exemplifies the value of
heavy editing for supporting the cause of social justice.

Like many archivists tasked with cataloguing offensive subject matter, Pilgrim is
wary of enabling racists rather than defeating them. He is well aware that some
persons may use the Jim Crow Museum website as a distributor of hateful images,
rather than an educational tool. If the website’s caricatures appear remixed on
tee shirts and posters then they perpetuate the historical injustices they were
meant to combat. In fact, unlike many other museums that highlight unique and
rare objects from the collection to attract visitors, the Jim Crow Museum makes
it a policy to keep its rare collections offline .
All the images accessible on the site can be found elsewhere on the Internet
without trouble. Pilgrim deliberately keeps these records of hate outside the
grasp of well- and ill-intentioned visitors alike because an inclusive database
is unnecessary for accomplishing the primary aims of this institution. Because
the mission of this museum is public education and challenging racism in
contemporary culture, a complete database of Mammy objects is superfluous to the
work of demonstrating this caricature’s role as a figment of the white imagination, a nostalgic
yearning for a reality that never had been. While the absence of a public database may hinder some researchers, it
achieves the museum’s objectives for the public admirably.

The structure of Pilgrim’s Jim Crow Museum suggests that the key to social
justice is the curation of digitized archival materials through thoughtful and
well-researched annotations. Several other archives and museum websites devoted
to hateful visual objects adopt strategies similar to these. Websites for the
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota
as well as the

HarpWeek Cultural History feature
titled Toward Racial Equality: Harper’s Weekly Reports on Black America, 1857-1874
both contain relatively few objects (less than 100) and use disclaimers and
critique to contextualize historical objects. Hateful images of African
Americans, Native Americans, Jewish peoples, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) appear in
CHGS’s Visualizing Otherness series, and
disclaimers accompany the first two categories. In the second instance, for
example, editors include a note stating: Many of the images shown here are offensive to
Native-Americans. However, they are shown because they represent means
within popular culture by which the sense of inferiority was imposed on
Native-Americans during the period after the defeat of Native peoples on
the Great Plains and the establishment of the ‘Reservation’ system by
the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. The images accompanying this disclaimer include toy sets, cigar bands,
and historic photographs in the first set, while contemporary Cleveland Indians,
Kansas City Chiefs, and Atlanta Braves merchandise dominates the second. Minimal
descriptive tags accompany images in both sets, and there are no means in place
to search these images: their position in an archive devoted to
Otherness subsumes competing significance or research
criteria (artist, medium, dimensions, etcetera).

HarpWeek, an archive indexing the illustrated
American periodical Harper’s Weekly (1857-1916),
accompanies Toward Racial Equality, with an
editorial Warning beginning: Website visitors should be warned that several of the
words, descriptions, and images from Harper’s
Weekly are considered racially offensive by today’s
standards. Harpweek assumes that any contemporary
visitor, and not just those members of the oppressed group (as is the case with
the CHGS disclaimer), may find this content traumatic. Like all of the archives
containing hateful content that my project considers, editors contend that the
need to digitize offensive materials outweighs the implied argument to veil
these histories. In fact, my research uncovered no counter to this claim among
academics excepting Gates’s assertion that some persons he knows: think the whole lot [of racist memorabilia] should be
assembled into one gigantic bonfire, incinerated, and the ashes buried
in an impenetrable vault, or strewn over the broadest reach of the
deepest ocean never to be displayed again. Digital archivists and museum curators seem to argue with a single voice
that collecting and critiquing offensive objects is necessary for generating
positive change; what differs is how this content is framed. Harpweek’s warning continues: The materials are presented in order to give a true
historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper’s view of black
Americans. We at HarpWeek hope this site
will serve as a valuable resource which provides an important
perspective on the multifaceted history of black Americans, generates a
deeper understanding and respect for the subject, and sparks further
interest in its study and discussion. In point of fact, this site includes not only this general disclaimer,
but also a statement written by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard
University, about the necessity of using, and not censoring, the term
nigger in historical archives. While these warnings
absolve the site of disseminating racist ideas and materials, it is the
editorial critique–the timelines, introductory essay, and notes accompanying
scanned illustrations–that permit Toward Racial
Equality to create a space for activism and justice.

Because editors at

Harpweek are aware of the hurt
racist historical objects continue to inflict, however good the archivist’s
intentions, many of the collected Harper’s Weekly
illustrations published during the 1850s, 60s, and 70s include contextual
information beyond the titles and publication dates. While text from Harper’s Weekly accompanies some of the illustrations,
which may inform readers of the image’s content and the artist’s identity, a few
go so far as to include editorial notes. For instance, The
Louisiana Murders–Gathering The Dead And Wounded illustration shows
two white men on horseback observing numerous African Americans, several of whom
are apparently injured or dead. Because the solemn scene does not include text,
a note explains that the illustration shows the 13 April 1873 Colfax Massacre,
which claimed the lives of 70 black men during southern Reconstruction. This
note helps visitors to make sense of an illustration depicting a terrible but
largely forgotten incident in United States history. This content adds much
needed historical background to an archive concerned with sharing how
subscribers to Harper’s Weekly perceived African
Americans, which factors into the website’s rhetorical framing journey
toward racial equality. However, beyond the general
categories of Slavery,Civil War,Reconstruction, and Culture &
Society–sections that accord to the Timelines portion of the
site–without access to the paid HarpWeek database
there is no way to search them based on criteria such as content, artist, or
dimensions within the feature Toward Racial Equality.

There can be no doubt that the websites for the educational and social justice
promoting Jim Crow Museum, the CHGS, and

HarpWeek’s
Toward Racial Equality use disclaimers, notes,
and essays critiquing stereotypes to treat offensive and traumatic images in a
sensitive and critically engaged manner. Accountability is a primary concern for
these archives, which their editors admirably and unceasingly aim to promote.
These projects all use a form of heavy annotation to give voice to historically
oppressed groups, but in order to control the narrative these sites also forego
the database’s searchable structure. While it is possible to search within any
of these websites using Google grammar (site:syntax), these
hypertext sites adopt the strategy of sorting images by editorial commentary
rather than descriptive metadata tags. Visitors are discouraged from searching
for specific archived images because on the whole the metadata attached to
objects within these three sites is generally limited to image titles and dates.
Usually excluded from these digital records is specific information about, say,
the artist, dimensions, material, style, or a description of content and subject
matter (tree, water, war, love). In Toward Racial
Equality, for example, it would be difficult to identify all
illustrations by a specific artist quickly or conclusively. Displaying objects
representing hateful ideas beside thoughtful criticism at the expense of
searchability is a calculated decision, but I wonder if annotations and critique
of hateful historical content might coexist in the resources and metadata of a
database.

Metadata Tags as Heavy Editing

Can the structure of a database simultaneously serve the goals of public
education, social justice, and academic research? The call to amass and critique
artifacts documenting past inequities made by Gates and Pilgrim, among others,
is opposed to current digital humanities and archival practice in three
significant ways. First, adding digital tags addressing identity politics
relating to race, class, gender, and religion, beyond the most blatant examples
of bigotry, moves the archive away from objective and mimetic documentation of
the past and into the realm of subjective editorializing. What seems biased and
hateful to some audiences may appear disinterested and inoffensive to others.
Second, because all historical objects reflect in some degree the ideology of
the era in which they were created, labeling these ideas using metadata tags
might be construed as heavy-handed and unnecessary. For example, if, as Tara
McPherson explains in

Why Are the Digital Humanities So
White?, race, particularly in the United States, is central to…
shaping how we see and know as well as the technologies that underwrite
or cement both vision and knowledge, then because all historic images produced in the West that depict
non-white persons are ideologically complicit in the discourse of race it is
needless to tag images using the Library of Congress subject headings of
race or even racism. Ostensibly in
the West this argument extends to gender, class, and sexuality among other
social and identity categories. Third, archivists and curators are
understandably hesitant to preserve and disseminate materials that might cause
offense. Although many museums possess racist objects, these are often buried in
backrooms and basements, and away from all visitors and donors. The
institutional marginalization of trauma-causing objects persists online. In
fact, humanist archivists have been a driving force behind digitizing many
non-canonical and often hateful historical objects and texts because [w]orks widely held as cultural treasures are more
likely to be digitized than acutely problematic material. Humanists motivated to integrate politicized and identity-driven
information about historical collections have arguably done as much as those in
the library and museum science field to think through the question of social
justice and the digital archive. Although texts out of the library sciences like
Museum Frictions and Exhibiting Cultures have contributed greatly to developing ideas about the
museum of conscience, the difficult task of creating
digital archives concerned with offensive objects is truly interdisciplinary. To
advance the cause of social justice, literary and cultural studies and digital
humanities scholars have much to learn from digital preservationists and library
and information scientists, and vice versa.

Because metadata has such significant consequences on scholars, digital
archivists must take the issue of metadata creation seriously–particularly when
tagging traumatic material in databases. Scaffolding the viewing experience for
both popular and academic audiences requires integrating the disclaimers,
contextual essays, and lesson plans for sites like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist
Memorabilia with database searchability. As I mentioned in the introduction of
this article, one project that foregrounds this concern in innovative ways is
Gailey’s

Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age
(RCLGA). Gailey and her collaborators
at Washington University in St. Louis facilitate searching by adding TEI tags.
In the case of the Reconstruction era Uncle Remus children’s books by Joel
Chandler Harris (1848-1908), the team essentially translated the stereotypically
exaggerated vernacular of the African American characters into regularized
English. This extra, or heavy, inscription makes the
database more accessible to humans and computers alike. For instance,
regularizing Harris’s phrase ole Brer Wolf want ter eat de little Rabs
allows visitors to find this passage by searching for the word
rabbit. Strategies for enabling searches
including heavy editing through TEI or database tags like
those used by the Pitt Rivers Museum supports traditional academic researches
while opening up new avenues for discovery. Comprehensive search criterion not
only facilitates precise historical investigations, it also streamlines the
types of distant reading and data mining that digital humanists use to create
sophisticated visualizations and models.

Gailey and her team’s technique for making the content of the database more
accessible stops short of actually critiquing Harris, whose fictions made
apologies for slavery and were responsible for creating many stereotypes about
African Americans that persist into the present day. The

RCLGA does not use TEI to point out or respond to the racist
aspects of the archive. Gailey argues that heavy editing by
way of a dual transcription–recording Harris’s words and their translation to
regularized English–allows the RCLGA to maintain
editorial objectivity because it makes no claim about the rightness or wrongness of the
readings, only how standardized their spellings are. This concern with objectivity aligns the project with the Pitt Rivers
Museum more so than the Jim Crow Museum, the CHGS, and HarpWeek. While social justice is not a central concern for the
archive, education certainly is. Gailey explains that: Because of the controversial nature of these works and
the variety of audiences the edition may draw, the editors plan to
provide multiple methods of access to the editions. One track would be
geared toward elementary schoolers and their teachers, another toward
high schoolers, and one, of course, for scholarly readers, each with its
own level and kind of editorial intervention. In this way the structure of the RCLGA
database facilitates educators at the primary and secondary level, rather than
assuming that only researchers will view these texts without support. Gailey and
her team acknowledge the offensiveness of the material and have designed the
project to scaffold the experience of multiple types of visitors. This strategy
supports audiences from academic settings well by providing the context
necessary for instructors to use the archive, hopefully with the intention of
advancing the message of social justice in their classrooms. How the
illustrations archived in the site will factor into this project remains to be
seen. Although Gailey does not address the question of heavy editing as it
relates to the illustrations archived in the RCLGA,
I extend the “heavy editing” approach to the project of making offensive
archived images both searchable and contextualized for educators and researchers
alike.

As the director and editor of

Visual Haggard, a
digital archive dealing with the type of images historically complicit in
Western systems of oppression, heavy descriptive metadata
tags provide an obvious avenue for adding contextual and categorical information
useful for all audiences and allied to the cause of social justice. Visual Haggard is intended to centralize and improve
access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist and imperialist H.
Rider Haggard (1856-1925). The archive contains over 1,300 images and receives
approximately 1,500 page views every month. Visual
Haggard has recently passed peer review with NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for
Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship. Tagging every
illustration to describe its subject matter has been one of the most significant
initiatives of Visual Haggard. Inspired
particularly by the long-running William Blake
Archive, which boasts the most complete and effectively tagged
images of any academic database, the metadata accompanying each image on Visual Haggard moves beyond the objective categories
of artist, novel, edition, page number, date of publication, publisher,
publication city, and image source (specific libraries, athenaeums, or private
collections). With the assistance of undergraduates at the Georgia Institute of
Technology enrolled in my English 1102 course, Visual
Culture, Digital Archives and H. Rider Haggard, I am in the process
of tagging all objects visible in these illustrations (window, horse, hat,
tree), the setting (continent, country, house, forest), the names of all
depicted characters, the posture and expression of characters, the number of
human figures (e.g. 1 figure, 3 figures, crowd), and the style of art
(Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist), to name a few categories. But in addition to these
descriptive tags, the database will also include searchable tags for critical
themes relating to identity and social justice.

The need to tag and contextualize images dealing with race and racism in the

Visual Haggard database has become increasingly
apparent in recent years. As an avid imperialist best known for his time spent
in South Africa, Haggard’s views towards race were complex and influential.
While the novelist became deeply enamored with the language, history, and
culture of the Zulu people, he also expressed stereotypically bigoted disdain
towards what he termed Kafirs (also spelled Kaffirs; a racist term for black
Africans in South Africa), Hottentots (an offensive term for the Khoikhoi
peoples), and half-castes (a derogatory phrase suggesting the inferiority of
mixed-race people which formed a part of anti-miscegenationist rhetoric). The
heroic and neoclassical appearance of the Zulus depicted by Haggard’s
illustrators seems to reflect the novelist’s admiration for these Romans of Africa. However, scenes showing white men aiming their firearms at unarmed
native servants, or slaughtering scores of brown men of African, South American,
or Middle Eastern descent serve as terrible cultural records of imperialism’s
violence and racism in the West. The artworks Visual
Haggard collects are graphic reminders of the ideological work that
adventure fictions like King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
and She (1887) accomplished. The pictures that
accompanied Haggard’s popular stories advanced the idea of Empire among British
and American audiences, and the archive’s metadata must reflect this.

Visitors can learn about this novelist’s general attitudes and prejudices
regarding race, imperialism, and gender from

Visual
Haggard’s editor’s statement and biography of Haggard. However,
encountering these illustrations and deciphering their import often occurs on an
image-by-image basis as each illustration archived in the database possesses a
unique take on these themes. For this reason, Visual
Haggard uses the Disqus commenting application for individual
images. Towards the bottom of every illustration’s hypertext page, expert and
lay visitors to the archive may contribute commentary and glosses. These
individualized annotations democratize the process of creating and disseminating
contextual information, however flawed and subjective, which is especially
helpful for annotating offensive objects. For instance, I recently added a
Disqus comment to Visual Haggard that historicizes,
defines, and critiques the racist slur Kafir that appears
on the illustration for Haggard’s The Witch’s Head
(1884) titled A shapely Kafir girl. Although I
assessed this offensive image created by artist Charles Kerr (1858-1907) in an
article for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, integrating critique into the interface of the
archive educates and promotes social justice for a broader audience (those who
might stumble upon the archive rather than access it deliberately).
Non-academics form an unlikely audience for periodicals like the JVC, so contextual information about offensive content
should be immediately accessible for the archive’s users. While Disqus comments
offer one means for reaching a general audience, critical audio guides for
select illustrations created by Georgia Tech undergraduates and supported by
Knight Lab’s SoundCite JS are also in the works. In addition to these strategies
for adding contextual information to the site, I use metadata to identify and
group critically significant images.

How to tag offensive because racist or sexist images has been a contentious issue
for

Visual Haggard since the archive’s early days.
Historically, I have tagged images of Africans using the descriptive words
race and African, but recently I
have begun to add the more critically weighty term racism
in cases where illustrators depict black characters as victims of violence or
exploitation. Adding this tag–which can be searched for using the site’s search
bar–makes the bigotry of Haggard and his illustrators more visible. Tagged
examples of racism, like other critical tags concerning
identity and oppression such as sexism, will likely be of
the greatest interest to scholars. However, these tags may also serve to educate
curious nonacademic visitors while promoting justice through identifying and
contextualizing histories of subjugation. Of course, the value and usefulness of
these terms is subjective and not without problems. To begin, Visual Haggard only permits plain string wildcard
searching, so although searching for gender or
racism works well, typing race
into the search bar will also turn up embrace,disgrace, and Horace (a protagonist of
Haggard’s She). More theoretically, this archive’s
critical tags will certainly shift to reflect a variety of voices as
interpretations of well-studied images change and less-studied images
proliferate. But, however imperfect, critical tags provide a worthwhile layer of
editorial critique.

Ambiguity makes

Visual Haggard a valuable tool in
the undergraduate classroom for provoking discussion about ideology and the
cultural history of the Scramble for Africa, as students
are eager to weigh-in on appropriate labels for these texts and artworks.
However, this same resistance to a singular or even limited set of
interpretations makes tagging the illustrations archived on the site
challenging. In the case of the imminently problematic image A shapely Kafir girl, I not only use the tags
race and racism, but also
gender and sexism because, in
addition to using a racial slur, this illustration depicts two white men leering
at an objectified African woman’s body. Here, the archivist is alleviated from
the burden of interpretation, as Haggard’s own words point to, and likely guided
the design for, this image’s racist and sexist undertones. Yet in the remainder
of the archive the issue of descriptive metadata tags is seldom so clear-cut. I
elect to use the term race far more often than
racism because Haggard and his illustrators’ complex
ideas about Africans, and especially the numerous heroic if stereotyped Zulu
warrior characters, make determining the appropriateness of this label
difficult. By applying the paradigm of heavy editing to
illustrations through Disqus comments, metadata tags, and eventually audio
guides, I have begun to make arguments and scaffold user experiences in a manner
that explicates critical content in these illustrations to enhance the site’s
ability to educate and promote justice.

It is worth noting that

Visual Haggard does not use
racial slurs as tags. While the Jim Crow Museum uses offensive historical
language for the purpose of educating visitors, because the role of racism and
sexism in Haggard’s illustrations is more subtle and ideological I adopt
accepted cultural studies and Library of Congress keywords as database tags.
Although kafir does appear as a searchable tag owing to
Kerr’s image caption, I have avoided other opportunities in which this term–a
frequent one in Haggard’s lexicon–might appear. Consider Russell Flint’s
illustration from King Solomon’s Mines of Allan
Quatermain and the African character Jim titled I saw
Neville’s wagon move off. Presently Jim came back running. At an earlier point in the text Haggard labels Jim
a Kafir hunter explicitly . Therefore, readers are meant to interpret Jim’s actions in terms
of this defining characteristic whenever he features in the plot. However, I
have not elected to do so because once I add kafir to the
list of descriptive tags attached to this image I will have perpetuated and in a
sense authored this term afresh. Because Flint never uses the word
kafir, and his depiction of Jim is not violent or
otherwise obviously racist, I instead tag this image with
African and race, and I leave the
task of interpreting Jim's representation in text and image to scholars.
Illustrations are never mimetic, so this archive's metadata should concern the
ideological content of images and their accompanying captions alone, rather than
the entirety of Haggard’s text. While Visual
Haggard must always be simultaneously over- and under-determined by
heavy editing, editor’s statements, and Disqus
comments, the richness of this digital archive’s metadata and Disqus comment
creation process–an accretive project which will remain perpetually incomplete
and unsettled–aspires to facilitate literary, cultural studies, digital
humanities, and art history scholarship at the same time the archive looks to
hold itself accountable to the historically disenfranchised groups traumatized
by the objects this site archives.

In this essay I have wrestled with the issue of how digital archivists might best
use metadata and annotations to sort and contextualize offensive–and
particularly racist objects–in a manner that educates the public, supports
social justice, and facilitates scholarly research. I suggest that archivists
and curators do well to move away from relying wholly upon disclaimers in order
to be held accountable to and act as allies for oppressed groups and persons.
Museums, libraries and archives that enhance the world’s cultural heritage by
making its collections available online often wrestle with questions relating to
digitizing and making traumatic materials accessible. Yet as the metadata of
digital archives increasingly forms a significant portion of data mining and
digital humanities projects, curators must evaluate shifts in the value and use
of the digitized collections they control.

For individuals working to create and sustain digital archives, the concerns
articulated in my article are practical, imminent, and must be weighed
thoughtfully. Although the process of adding substantial contextual metadata to
archives can be time consuming and expensive, I have argued that by prioritizing
problematic materials and viewing metadata as a process rather than a conclusive
endpoint, heavy editing can allow for a more sensitive approach to digitizing
and making historical objects accessible. I take seriously Tara McPherson’s
warning: Today, we risk adding the digital humanities to our
proliferating disciplinary menus without any meaningful and substantial
engagement with fields such as gender studies or critical race
theory. It is my hope that this paper advances scholarly conversation about the
relationship of digital archivists to traumatic materials at the same time it
suggests some best practices for allowing metadata to contribute to the cause of
justice.